It is Fish River Roasters twentieth birthday this month. In September 2006 we started roasting in our shed in O’Connell NSW, where I still live, to where we are today seems an improbable journey.
My wife and I started Fish River Roasters after running and roasting coffee for our own cafe. Our cafe years, from 1997 to 2005, taught me a lot about coffee, cafes and people.
A lot has changed since we started Fish River in 2006.
Cafes served two types of milk. Full cream and skim. Maybe the odd soy milk but that was all for alternative milks.
Cappuccino’s were the king of the espresso menu. The supremacy of the flat white would come later.
Customers have become more knowledgeable and more defined in what they like. An espresso order is now a customised beverage by strength, temperature and milk types. The difference between making a high quality, consistent cup or just an ordinary one has become the difference between success and failure for a cafe.
Coffee machines and grinders have become vastly more complicated. Dual boilers, PID controllers, shot clocks. More points of failure and they require some specialist knowledge to keep them running right.
Baristas skills have gotten better. In 2006 if something brown came out of the machine you were making coffee. Sure we looked at how the shot ran, looked at colour and tasted a lot of coffee but consistency was illusive.
Then we started weighing shots and worked out how important grind size and dose were to the flavours in the cup. That and how to produce them consistently. Not to mention how good latte art has become.
We started roasting on a 12kg Diedrich roaster. We now roast on a 60kg Joper.
I was really excited the first week I needed to roast 100kg of coffee. We now do more than that by 8am Monday.
Our delivery vehicle was a Toyota Kluger SUV. The old bus only just stopped working last year with 435,000 kms on the clock. We now have seven vehicles on the road.
While for the first few years it was just my wife and I in the shed, roasting, packing and delivering and then doing farmers markets on the weekend. Now we have 13 people working with us.
2014 saw a move into Bathurst. We needed three phase power, a gas main and room to grow.
The common thread is a love of cafes and coffee that carries us from our start to now.
Fish River has always been a people business. It is the people that have worked with us over the years that have really made our business work for our customers.
Finally the success of our business is down to the support from our customers. Our cafe and internet customers are what make it possible for us to do what we do with coffee everyday. Thank you for making Fish River possible.
